One Plus Three
by princeAnus
Summary: He could be allowed to mourn just this once. A tribute to Beyond Birthday. L x B, rating for the possibility of perversion of loose descriptions.


**Title:** One Plus Three

**Summary:** He could be allowed to mourn for just this once.

**Rating:** T

**Pairing:** L Lawliet/Beyond Birthday

**Disclaimer:** I do not claim to own any rights to the manga Death Note, it's counterpart novel, or characters therein. I only own the ideas of the speculative instances portrayed below. As such, none of the events portrayed are factual, and are not intended to be taken as fact.

**A.N.:** Yesterday, January 21, 2009, was not only the first full day of the United States' new administration, but also the five year anniversary of Beyond Birthday's death date. I'm really liking doing these tributes, huh?

* * *

**One Plus Three**

He did not notice as the hours ticked past him; did not notice as the monitor of his computer turned to black, saving battery after a five minute span of a screen-saver rolling back and forth across the pixels. Truth be told, L could not recall even blinking from the moment he saw the report of that day's deaths on his screen.

He wanted to feel more than he did. Even remembering the words as a broken record over startlingly clear memories did not change the fact that he could not pull back the emotions he had beaten back into the corner of his mind, only sampled at for use as a tool in investigations. But, he tried to convince himself that it was all right to feel that way. To feel nothing. It was required of him. He could never have solved the cases he did when he was eight years of age if he had not. He could never have survived if he had not limited his ability to feel human. And it was a side effect of his isolation. With no one to respond to, humans will forget how to respond to emotions, become mechanical and hollow. He told himself that same thing over and over, but it did not change the facts that were spelled out so plainly.

Beyond Birthday had died of a heart attack at 7:42 PM in a Los Angeles Asylum for the Criminally Insane, where he was absolutely and completely alone.

It was only when Watari spoke quietly through the microphone, saying that he was going to go to sleep, that L realized that the entire team had left already, assuming something impressively intelligent was going on behind those floating black irises. He felt utterly alone for the first time in twelve years, and found his throat coated in some imaginary substance similar to plaster as he attempted to bid the man he often transposed over the face of his late father in his mind, and all that came out was a series of small popping sounds. The smallest of comforts came in the fact that, for several more seconds, the old inventor held down the button to his microphone, the faint sounds of his breathing still somehow picked up by the device before the short crackling of the transmission cutting out.

And then there was silence. He observed the silence; somehow with his eyes just as he did with his ears, counting the many things that prevented him from truly being in silence. His own hiss of breath through his nose, the nigh-silent hum of the few processes still running on his computer, the far-away drone of cars as they whipped through the Tokyo midnight scenes, going about business as usual, playtime as usual. Weren't they afraid in the least bit? They knew of the eyes that watched them, the man who quite openly would deal out punishments to the unruly and never bat a lash. They spoke their botched name for him, praised him for the trend and worshipped him blindly.

Did they not see how easy it was for him to erase the repentant, and not stop to think of reformed minds and families and friends? Could they not hear the beautiful voices cutting out in the middle of the night?

He moved from his seat, stumbling slightly on numb feet to the window, gazing out through a curtain he dare not even touch. He watched the tiny cars slip past, looking about the size of the toys of the boy most likely to take his place once he was dead. That notion was quite easy to see after the report. It became so clear to him that nothing of his life had a chance of survival beyond a few more years, when it would be eradicated by some power so pathetic and obvious and powerless that it would have snuck right past his watchful eyes.

It was so simple to remember certain moments. So easy to recall the hushed, but hastened breaths of the Backup who had kept his hair longer, had always worn some sort of makeup from the moment he had turned twelve, several months later than the fidgeting detective. He could remember the long moments, just standing or lying impossibly close to one another, certain that the moment they let their paranoid, hyper-vigilant guards down, someone would burst into the room. Sense memory sent familiar tingling into his fingers, and he could feel the soft skin of the other boy still being touched by his hand, he could even feel the skin vibrating with every heartbeat. But no matter how hard he tried, he never felt Beyond Birthday's fingers touch his cheek in that same manner of invisible, intangible fingers. He couldn't feel him reaching out any longer, but he could feel the emotions he had written off in his own paranoid tension.

He could feel the fear grasping for a hold on his shoulders, and he could feel the sadness ghost across his lips. He knew that he should have asked what those emotions foretold, but he had been too afraid. B had always known just a little bit more that he should have--he had known when A would kill himself, and he would know just when to come into L's room and lean against him, say there was nothing that could be done to stop it before the official confirmation of death had reached him. He knew he should have known better than to pretend it wasn't real and allow that incredible normalcy in the midst of so much pain and fear and confusion to be crushed out into nothing, only to pull itself into a mold, shrieking and running from what was only inevitable.

He had always known that the madness could have been stopped. He had always regretted entering Beyond's real name into that system, but it had been too late and he resigned himself to that thought, not letting any others in. But he knew that it was that folly that had caused his death.

Approximately five hours after the death of Beyond Birthday at 12:36 AM on January 22, 2004, L Lawliet concluded that it was entirely his fault.

But there was no such thing as an answer as simple as that. He blamed himself, of course, and he had absolutely no doubts about that being the truth, but it didn't make anything easier. There was no relief at placing the blame, if anything he felt even worse. It felt as though his daring strike, taking up B's old alias to look his adversary straight in the eyes, had been the cause of this death. It had been a mere four days since he had made direct, human eye contact with Light Yagami in that examination hall, and even if it was not an intentional coincidence that B would be killed such a short time afterwards, L resented the boy and all of his misconstrued notions of justice, his childish crime and punishment, and reconsidered for the first time in his life his convictions about proving guilt so thoroughly.

L stepped away from the window, feeling he had already spent more time than was safe in front of it, and walked very slowly into his thus far unused bedroom. He let his muscles follow paths he thought they had forgotten as he crawled awkwardly onto the mattress, letting his eyes blur the room slightly and sliding across the duvet as though there was another body lying next to him. It was alright to let himself slip this once, he could be allowed normal mourning habits for one night. And when he let himself slip, he came careening down into the bottom of the pit he hadn't known to be there, losing track of where his hands were, when he had gotten under the covers and whether or not that was really his own hair he was feeling and not some blessing sensation from an escaped B, not a dead one.

But he was alone.


End file.
